Hudson Bay

In Canada, nothing represents tradition more than the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Hudson's Bay Co. But in Canada, as here, economic reality is toppling tradition. As visitors to the north are aware, Hudson's Bay metropolitan stores have gone modern. Known universally as "the Bay" stores, they are as up to date as any U.S. department store, often found anchoring a suburban shopping center. But now Hudson's Bay Co.

Hudson's Bay Co. Digital Collection, provided by the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, is a graphical collection of 19th and 20th century aboriginal (and European and Canadian) artifacts. The address is: http://www.schoolnet.ca/collections/hbc/ind1en.htm

A traveler walking along the eastern bank of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec can stand on the oldest bedrock known on Earth. This section of the planet's crust may be as much as 4.28 billion years old, researchers Jonathan O'Neil of McGill University and Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution reported Friday in the journal Science.

Discovery's astronauts focused their computerized military camera on Madagascar and a Hudson Bay island and received laser signals from an Air Force ground station. The crewmen logged their second successful laser test as the space shuttle flew over the Hawaiian island of Maui, on the mission's 82nd orbit. They said their laser receiver got signals for about two minutes.

A small Canadian company present at the birth of the nation has been brought back to life and is flourishing by looking to its roots, including fur-trading. Although North West Co. Inc. was founded in 1779, it spent most of the past 200 years as a division of its onetime rival, Hudson's Bay Co. But in 1987, a group of employees and investors bought the division, repatriated the North West Co. name, and started to take the reborn company forward by looking backward.

Canada's Hudson Bay--1,000 desolate miles north of Winnipeg, Manitoba--has been called the polar bear capital of the world, and the time is approaching for the huge creatures to make their seasonal appearance there. Every year from early October to mid-November, roughly 500 to 600 polar bears--some weighing up to 1,200 pounds--begin gathering on the outskirts of the tiny town of Churchill as they wait for the Hudson Bay ice pack to solidify.